Tag Archives: Art and Revolution

George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging … Continue reading

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Encyclopédie des Nuisances: Literacy, memory and the past (III)

The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. … Continue reading

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C.P. Cavafy/Laurie Anderson: Waiting for the Barbarians

The force of Constantine Cavafy’s poetry continues to resonate in our times.

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Annie Le Brun on Surrealism

… the worst thing would be for surrealism, turned on its head, would be to make us forget the extent to which “the flora and fauna of surrealism are unmentionable”, but also that the quality of the air we breathe … Continue reading

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The surrealist film-eye

In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon. . . . The creative handling of film images is such that, among all means of human expression, its way of functioning is most reminiscent … Continue reading

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When the “surrealist object” becomes a “surrealist self”: Claude Cahun

I’m an asocial rebel and a revolutionary dreamer,” she writes, “and do not fit any political party; my religion is paganism, including inspired figures such as Socrates, Buddha, and Kropotkin; and my (dialectical) method of thinking is taken from Heraclitus, … Continue reading

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Surrealism and the art of making surrealist objects

Poetry must be made by all, not by one. Comte de Lautréamont In poetry and in painting, Surrealism has done everything it can and more to increase these short circuits. It believes, and it will never believe in anything more … Continue reading

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Surrealism in the Mirror of Anarchism

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy.Poetry teaches him to. It bears … Continue reading

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André Breton: A Surrealist Manifesto

… make no mistake about it, those responsible for putting this philtre of the absolute into circulation are the enemies of order. They pass it round secretly, under the eyes of the police, in the guise of books and poems. … Continue reading

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Surrealism: The unfinished revolution

Surrealism is not, has never been, and will never be a literary or artistic school but is a movement of the human spirit in revolt and an eminently subversive attempt to reenchant the world: an attempt to reestablish the “enchanted” … Continue reading

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